Dear Congressman: Thanks to the XIV Amendment, Rejecting the Budget Sellout is an Easy No Vote for All Sides

By Webster G. Tarpley Ph.D.

Washington DC, August 1, 2011— As the twilight descends over the nation’s capital today, more and more members of Congress from both the Tea Party right and the Progressive left, as well as intelligent moderates of all types, are demonstrating an increasing willingness to vote down the dangerous and reckless deal on the federal budget announced yesterday evening by the Obama White House as a means of avoiding default. In reality, this wretched piece of legislation makes the nation pay far too high a price – in terms of damage to the Constitution, and in terms of a fatal gutting of our economic rights won under the New Deal and Great Society – to make it acceptable.

All the more so, since widespread awareness that the XIV Amendment to the Constitution has made it common knowledge that neither default nor killer cuts need result from rejecting Obama’s sellout, since the president has ample power to order the Secretary of the Treasury to carry on borrowing to protect the full faith and credit of the United States – even if Congress fails to authorize any increase in the debt ceiling.

The Obama-Reid-McConnell-Boehner accord is full of deal-breakers for everyone. Because of the well-known polarization of the Congress, it is necessary to summarize the arguments against this package from the Tea Party point of view, and then from the progressive Democrat point of view.

For the Tea Party

If you are a Tea Party Republican, you must consider the following. Your supporters hate Big Government and take their stand on the Constitution of the United States. This rotten deal is an attack on both of these ideas. People who hate Big Government are not likely to be happy with the creation of Harry Reid’s Supercommittee, now called the Supercongress. This amounts to a new, third House of Congress, as if the people were not already disgusted enough with the two existing houses. It will be a kind of Star Chamber, with six members representing what your constituents would recognize as the forces of Big Government, banksters, and the New World order. It will be a step towards dictatorship by the bankers and by Wall Street. You do not know the names of the six members who will be named to this Supercongress, but they are sure to be Washington insiders and elitists. There is absolutely nothing to prevent the Supercongress from coming up with a long list of tax increases – and when they do, you’ll be on the hook in the eyes of your constituents, who will start asking you why you gave away so much legislative power to this secretive and unaccountable committee, while getting nowhere on the balanced budget amendment.